Column: Mohegan Tribe emerges from subjugation with a casino

The purpose of this trip could be summed up neatly: I was driving from New York City to central Connecticut, to a casino called Mohegan Sun, owned by and greatly enriching the descendants of a subjugated Native American tribe, to see a friend of mine sing for a rock'n'roll band called Starship.

We should back up more. Colonists from England, seeking religious and economic freedom, began coming to America in the 1600s. They pushed inland from the East Coast and soon were all over Connecticut, crowding the native population, which in that region included the Pequot tribe and the Mohegans.

The colonists brought diseases with them against which the Mohegans had little defence and who, weakened and overmatched, chose to form an alliance with the English, and who soon fought with the English against the Mohegans' traditional enemy, the Pequot. As a result of those battles, and through innumerable dubious land deals and land grabs and the assimilation of the Mohegan tribe into mainstream white culture, by the 1800s the Mohegans had dwindled to about 400 members and controlled only a few thousand acres near the Thames River Valley. And by the 1900s, Mohegans had virtually no tribal land at all. Worse, when the US government began recognising certain tribes in the 1970s, granting them sovereign-nation status and the right to (relative) self-determination, the Mohegans were not among those tribes recognised. In a decision that defines perverse, the government that drove the Mohegans from their land and forced their displacement and loss of culture refused to recognise their existence, asserting that the Mohegans had failed to keep adequate records of their meetings and affairs, specifically citing a lack of documentation of the tribe's activities in the 1940s and 1950s.

But in 1992, the Mohegans' chief Ralph Sturges revived the effort to get federal recognition, and was soon aided by some new and powerful friends. Three companies – RJH Development, LMW Investments of Connecticut and Slavik Suites Inc of Michigan – together proposed the idea of building a casino on ancestral Mohegan land. The Mohegans liked the idea, and the companies, in their great generosity, then provided expensive attorneys well versed in applicable laws. These attorneys aided the Mohegans in getting their tribe recognised and, under the Mohegan Nation Land Claims Settlement Act of 1994, which granted the tribe control over their ancestral land on which they could do what they pleased, the Mohegans decided to build a casino-resort-entertainment complex.